Full Description
The contributors to Re-Understanding Media advance a feminist version of Marshall McLuhan's key text, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, repurposing his insight that "the medium is the message" for feminist ends. They argue that while McLuhan's theory provides a falsely universalizing conception of the technological as a structuring form of power, feminist critics can take it up to show how technologies alter and determine the social experiences of race, gender, class, and sexuality. This volume showcases essays, experimental writings, and interviews from media studies scholars, artists, activists, and those who work with and create technology. Among other topics, the contributors extend McLuhan's discussion of transportation technology to the attics and cargo boxes that moved Black women through the Underground Railroad, apply McLuhan's concept of media as extensions of humans to analyze Tupperware as media of containment, and take up 3D printing as a feminist and decolonial practice. The volume demonstrates how power dynamics are built into technological media and how media can be harnessed for radical purposes.
Contributors. Nasma Ahmed, Morehshin Allahyari, Sarah Banet-Weiser, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Brooke Erin Duffy, Ganaele Langlois, Sara Martel, Shannon Mattern, Cait McKinney, Jeremy Packer, Craig Robertson, Sarah Sharma, Ladan Siad, Rianka Singh, Nicholas Taylor, Armond R. Towns, and Jennifer Wemigwans
Contents
Preface: The Centre on the Margins / Sarah Sharma vii
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction: A Feminist Medium Is the Message / Sarah Sharma 1
Part I. Retrieving McLuhan's Media
1. Transporting Blackness: Black Materialist Media Theory / Armond R. Towns 23
2. Sidewalks of Concrete and Code / Shannon Mattern 36
3. Hardwired / Nicholas Taylor 51
4. Textile, the Uneasy Medium / Ganaele Langlois 68
Part II. Thinking with McLuhan: An Invitation
5. Dear Incubator / Sara Martel 87
6. Wifesaver: Tupperware and the Unfortunate Spoils of Containment / Brooke Erin Duffy and Jeremy Packer 98
7. "Will Miss File Misfile?" The Filing Cabinet, Automatic Memory, and Gender / Craig Robertson 119
8. Computers Made of Paper, Genders Made of Cards / Cait McKinney 142
9. Sky High: Platforms and the Feminist Politics of Visibility / Rianka Singh and Sarah Banet-Weiser 163
Part III. Media after McLuhan
10. Scanning for Black Data: A Conversation with Nasma Ahmed and Ladan Siad / Sarah Sharma and Rianka Singh 179
11. 3D Printing and Digital Colonialism: A Conversation with Morehshin Allahyari / Sarah Sharma and Rianka Singh 192
12. Toward a Media Theory of the Digital Bundle: A Conversation with Jennifer Wemigwans / Sarah Sharma 208
Afterword: After McLuhan / Wendy Hui Kyong Chun 225
Bibliography 233
Contributors 255
Index 259
